The Ultimate Pros and Cons of WordPress

It can be overwhelming just starting out a new website. There are a ton of ways to build a website out there. Each has it's own special use case.

When it comes to systems to build a website, hardly anything can beat WordPress. With its vast array of support and it's thousands of plugins, there is no better option out there. That being said, there are some minor drawbacks it's good to be aware of before getting started.

If you are researching and trying to figure out if WordPress is the best option for you, this article is for you! We're going to look at the best things WordPress has to offer, but also look at some of it's downfalls. Once we're finished, you should have a clearer picture of the best way to build your website.

Pros of WordPress

It's free

WordPress is 100% free (wordpress.org, NOT wordpress.com). Other website builders like Squarespace cost a monthly fee, and sometimes aren't cheap. Considering the amount you're getting, thats a great deal for free.

Amount of support and free tutorials

With WordPress powering over 75 million websites, it's hard not to see how popular it is. With this many people using it, there is an article for almost anything out there.

Need help creating a button? There's an article for that.

Need help figuring out what an error message means? There's an article for that.

You can google almost any WordPress problem and find yourself a solution. That alone is a huge plus for WordPress. It's easy to get help when you need it.

Over 50k Plugins Available

There are over 50,000 plugins available for WordPress. Some paid, some free. This means that there is almost always an option available to add the functionality you need to your website.

Plugins make it easy to add features to your website without needing to code anything.

Design Pages without Coding

There are many popular page builders out there for WordPress that can be added to make designing pages incredibly easy. You can design an entire website without even touching a piece of code.

Page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or even Gutenberg (WordPress' built in page builder) make it easy to make any change you need.

SEO is Easy

WordPress is built on a framework that supports pretty good SEO practices, and it makes it easy to add a specialized SEO plugin to customize it even further.

Thousands of Themes

Just like plugins, WordPress also has a wide variety of themes widely available. Some free, some paid. There is a theme out there to fit your need, no matter how "niche" your business is.

Marketing Tool Integrations

WordPress has amazing support for multiple marketing tools, such as Mailchimp, SendGrid, Hubspot, Eventbrite, and more. This makes it easy to keep your marketing and website closely connected to save you a bit of time.

Professionals Widely Available

Even though there are so many ways to find a solution to a WordPress problem by yourself, sometimes you'd just rather pay someone to fix it for you. With WordPress, it's just as easy to find someone to fix your problem at a rate that you can afford. Since it's such a popular system, there is a huge amount of support for it.

TLDR: Pros

WordPress is free, it has a huge amount of widely available support, and thousands of plugins and themes to choose from.

Cons of WordPress

Some WordPress sites are More Vulnerable than Others

Because of it's popularity, that makes WordPress a target for hackers. Does this mean that WordPress straight out of the box is any more likely to get hacked than other CMS systems? No.

There are a number of things you can do to make your site more secure, and there are things you can do to make it (accidentally) less secure. For example, anytime you install a plugin, you are putting some amount of trust into the developer of that plugin to make it secure and keep it updated. If they don't, technically a hacker could exploit that.

Needs to be Updated Frequently

WordPress hás a number of things that will need updating as new releases come out. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself will all need updating to make sure that you're site is patched up and less likely to get hacked. This doesn't take a lot of time, but is something to consider when setting up a WordPress site. Just letting it sit there for years without ever updating isn't the best idea.

Page Size

The speed and size of your pages built in WordPress will depend on a number of things, but there are a lot of themes out there that will add unnecessary features to your site, and therefore slow down your site/increase your page size. Google likes a speedy website, so this is important to consider.

TLDR: Cons

A common complaint you'll find with WordPress is that it's less secure. While this is true in some instances, it's always going to depend on how the site was set up and your dedication to updating plugins and themes.